BackupAssist has rebuilt its data protection product with data deduplication, compression, multicloud support and AES encryption for the SMB Hyper-V market.

BackupAssist Software added deduplication and compression to its Microsoft Windows and Hyper-V data protection product in an attempt to bring enterprise-type features to its SMB backup application.

Launched this week, BackupAssist 10 includes end-to-end encryption for storage buckets in multi-tenant cloud environments. The application also has a new cloud and deduplication engine, so customers can store data in private clouds, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google or any other public cloud.

"We built a completely customized cloud engine instead of building upon existing protocols," said Linus Chang, CEO at BackupAssist. "It actually took us four years to develop this solution. For the first two years, we went down the rabbit hole and burnt a lot of money. We had to build a core deduplication [product], but without the need to add more CPU and hardware. We had to work with the hardware that customers already had. Deduplication takes a lot of memory and CPU, and it was what we needed to avoid."

BackupAssist Software is one of the smaller vendors in the market for Hyper-V, Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server backup. It performs variable block-sized deduplication, image-based snapshots and file-based backups, disaster recovery and archiving. The company claims up to 30,000 subscription customers.

BackupAssist sells mainly to SMBs and cloud providers who address the SMB market. Deni Connor, founder of analyst firm Storage Strategies Now, based in Austin, Texas, said the new release gives BackupAssist Software an advantage over rivals that target SMBs, but lack enterprise-type features.

We built a completely customized cloud engine, instead of building upon existing protocols.
Linus ChangCEO, BackupAssist

"It shows they are growing up," she said of BackupAssist. "Many backup and cloud companies that openly target the SMB and SME [small to medium enterprise] space don't have a lot of those features. They also support multiple clouds, and users are not locked into one cloud provider.

"I was impressed that they also focus on Hyper-V," Connor added. "It's an underserved market, especially for SMB and SME. They seem to understand the cloud is a very good solution for the SMB companies that do not have full-time administrators."

"We found limitations with that protocol," Chang said. "It did not do deduplication, compression or encryption. It did not work very well with huge data sets. It scaled to 1 million files, but by the time it got to 3 million files, it really struggled. It was just slow. Rsync worked OK with smaller clouds, but when we started to get big, we hit limitations."

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